Sainsbury's and Rovi team up to take on Netflix, Lovefilm and Now TV

UK supermarket giant Sainsbury's and digital media specialist Rovi have partnered to bring a new movie and TV show streaming service to Britain later this year. The retailer has licensed the Rovi Entertainment Store technology in order to provide video-on-demand titles, many as soon as they hit DVD and Blu-ray.

The service will also be going head-to-head with other brands, all vying to be the UK's on-demand platform of choice. Netflix and Lovefilm are now well established, but newcomer Now TV, Sky's foray into the market, has been expanding of late.

It is not known at present whether Sainsbury's will adopt a subscription model, like Netflix, or pay-as-you-play, like KnowHow. Pocket-lint expects the latter, considering that KnowHow also partners with Rovi, but perhaps the retailer will opt to offer the choice of either method of payment, like Now TV.

What we do know is that Sainsbury's will be initially launching the service through its online Sainsbury's Entertainment web portal (for PCs and Macs, therefore). The company plans to expand to Smart TVs, Blu-ray players, smartphones and game consoles in the following months.